


Death, and After

by myhomeistheshire



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Post Finale, tw for suicidal ideations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 18:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18016208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhomeistheshire/pseuds/myhomeistheshire
Summary: They never talk about the dying.





	Death, and After

They never talk about the dying.

 

Most of them deal with it through humor, while it’s happening - jokes about _say that pun again and I’ll throw myself off the ship_ and _or what, you’ll kill me_ , but once it’s finished, after the day of story and song, after they try and get back to normal? It never comes up.

 

* * *

 

Merle has nightmares. It’s always John, every night when he closes his eyes. Like clockwork, the pain and uncertainty is always waiting for him, along with the knowledge of all the time he is losing. Because he loses _so much_ of it. Time that his teammates are spending lost and fighting and he can’t be there with him. He starts practicing his plant magic at night - the feeling of the earth is calming, and the less he sleeps, the better.

 

* * *

 

Magnus can’t stop thinking about Julia. It seems so fucking sick, now that he has his memories back, that he has stopped his heart from beating so many times and they were all before he had a reason to want it. Every day it’s a little harder to remember that there are people who need his protection, and a little easier to think he could die trying.

 

* * *

 

Davenport is reading dictionaries. In every language he knows, relentlessly, in every spare moment he has. He can’t help the startled feeling that he’ll lose his words, his journey, his _existence_ again and not know it. He feels like he’s running out of time to make sure this hasn’t happened. He was given an extra hundred years, but now time is slipping through his fingers - he can’t help but think of all the stupid ways he let his life be taken from him, and how it could happen again at any time.

 

* * *

 

Lup fights. Her job with Kravitz lets her unleash everything she’s feeling, allows her the pure sweeping rage she hasn’t let herself acknowledge in a long time. She feels every death in the tips of her fingers. She is immune to it now, isn’t she? She lets another soul slip through her fingers and doesn’t think of Taako, of Lucretia, of every time she’s lost someone dear to her and how it will seem like moments before it happens again.

 

* * *

 

Barry starts a scientific library. It’s so small, the contributions he’s left to this world. He expands it and every time he tells himself that this will keep him human, keep him alive, keep him _him_. He kisses Lup every morning and every night and thinks about what will happen when he’s been dead longer than he was alive - wonders if there will be any part of the Barry left who stepped on a ship with the fear and wonder that came of not knowing, and of finding out.

 

* * *

 

Lucretia burns her journals, after everything is finished. Her IPRE journals have stood on the shelf in the hidden room behind her office, a testament to everything they went through. A declaration of who she once was. It burns inside her, tearing and writhing and she _cannot take it_. So she runs outside in the chill night air on a moon that she created, and sends them up in flames to make it stop.

 

* * *

 

Taako thinks its the sort of morbid humor the universe would possess, that his life is so entrenched by death. His boyfriend. His twin. His brother in law. He used to be able to look at Lup and see himself in her features, but now that he’s lost his beauty and she’s become a lich there are oceans gaping between them. He starts examining Merle’s stash of potions and wondering how different it really would be, dying one final time.

 

* * *

 

Angus McDonald, boy detective, keeps a journal of these things, and makes up his mind to fix them.

 

 


End file.
